Hoarding details

Just recently, I discovered the difference between details and concepts. Details help explain a part of a concept through examples, specific execution, mistakes, etc. They are concrete and have practical applications. A concept, in turn, is a set of knowledge describing the phenomenon itself — its root causes and why it continues to exist. Concepts are abstract, harder to understand, and can’t be applied immediately, but they are the ones that truly grant knowledge.

Both (concepts and details) are important, they can’t exist without each other. The problem is that, due to new way we now consume information, we’ve started prioritizing memorizing details over deeply understanding concepts. Tweets without elaboration, infinite options, continuous partial attention — all of these cause us to focus on fleeting facts and stories, creating only the illusion of real understanding (which we hope to apply later).

I was exposed to this to an extreme degree. I like listening to interviews, reading articles, and books, and many ideas from there were ending up in my notes without much digestion. One of the last times I listened to a podcast, that criticized meetings at tech companies and proposed their complete abandonment. The arguments were typical: meetings are tiring, meetings lead to more meetings, meetings are an alternative to real work.

I’ve long sympathized with this view, though never had a concrete explanation for why. Since these arguments felt like an explanation, I wrote something along these lines in my notes: “meetings are evil, companies should avoid them at all costs.”

This happened to me everywhere — studying a technical pattern, brainstorming ideas with the product team, diving into new fields. I had a lot of “profound” notes (details), but the moment I tried to apply them practically or explain them to someone else, none of them made sense.

That’s why I decided to change my approach. Today, if I hear that “meetings are evil,” I try to ask one question: “why?”. From this question, I’ll start an hour-long adventure into cognitive psychology and management. I’ll shallowly (which is fine) explore concepts related to cognitive fatigue, decision-making patterns, and the lack of body language cues, skim through articles about successes and failures in asynchronous teams, and only then draw my own conclusions (details with exceptions).

If a detail isn’t worth deep research, there’s a high chance I don’t need to remember it in the first place. I’ll try to forget about it, get it out of my head, and focus on something more important.